FBI Director Kash Patel testifies before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S., September 16, 2025.
Jonathan Ernst | Reuters
FBI Director Kash Patel on Monday filed a lawsuit seeking $250 million in damages from The Atlantic magazine, claiming defamation in an article that alleges he abuses alcohol.
Patel, over the weekend, had vowed to sue The Atlantic for the article published Friday, which carried the headline “Kash Patel’s Erratic Behavior Could Cost Him His Job.”
“The FBI director has alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences,” the article’s subhead says.
Patel’s 19-page suit was filed in U.S. District Court in Washington.
The civil complaint also names the article’s author, Sarah Fitzpatrick, as a defendant.
Patel’s suit said it seeks to hold the defendants “accountable for a sweeping, malicious, and defamatory hit piece.”
“Defendants are of course free to criticize the leadership of the FBI, but they crossed the legal line by publishing an article replete with false and obviously fabricated allegations designed to destroy Director Patel’s reputation and drive him from office,” the suit alleges.
The complaint says the magazine and Fitzpatrick published the article “with actual malice, despite being expressly warned, hours before publication, that the central allegations were categorically false.”
Patel’s suit lists 17 specific claims made by the article as being among the allegedly “numerous false and defamatory statements of fact” about him.
They include claims that he “is known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication, in many cases at the private club Ned’s in Washington, D.C., while in the presence of White House and other administration staff,” that he “drinks to excess at the Poodle Room in Las Vegas, where he frequently spends parts of his weekends,” and that on multiple occasions in the past year, “members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated.”
The Poodle Room is a members-only social club atop the Fontainebleau Las Vegas hotel.
The Atlantic also reported that a “request for ‘breaching equipment’ — normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings — was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors,” the suit says.
“Director Patel does not drink to excess at these establishments or anywhere else, and this has not, and has never been, a source of concern across the government,” the suit says.
Patel, in a statement issued by his attorneys at the Binnall Law Group, said, “The Atlantic’s story is a lie.”
“They were given the truth before they published, and they chose to print falsehoods anyway,” Patel said. “I took this job to protect the American people and this FBI has delivered the most prolific reduction in crime in US history. Fake news won’t report it, and their toxicity will never erode nor stop our Mission.”
The Atlantic, in a statement to CNBC, said, “We stand by our reporting on Kash Patel, and we will vigorously defend The Atlantic and our journalists against this meritless lawsuit.”
Public figures, such as Patel, have a high legal bar in lawsuits that allege defamation.
The Supreme Court, in a landmark 1964 ruling in a case known as New York Times Company v. Sullivan, said a public figure must show that the publisher acted with actual malice to prevail in a defamation claim.
The court in that opinion defined actual malice as making a statement “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false.”